avast! is warning that there are three types of holiday-related email scams making the rounds: Charity scams, UPS delivery scams, and E-card scams.

Avoid getting ripped off… read all about it.

Clients whose sites are on HAI Hosting, can use the following instructions for:

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If you aren’t sure if your site is on HAI Hosting, just check your pop and smtp servers. If they include "secureserver" then you are!

All these links have been added to the Client Section’s Email Setup Tutorials page as well so they will be there when you need them.

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We hope you’ll take advantage of the many new services HAI Hosting has to offer. We’re very excited about this new venture and we hope to help add excitement to any new venture you may have been thinking of as well.

So what exactly is SPAM? Most people will agree that SPAM is unsolicited email. However, if you didn’t read the fine print at that web site you ordered from or rushed through the sign up for that new login you can’t live without and left a box checked that said “it’s ok to send me stuff” then you simply got what you asked for. These kinds of mailings, while you might find annoying, are not technically SPAM and in these cases, it’s ok to simply unsubscribe or log back into your account and check out your preferences or email settings or whatever they happen to be calling it today!

That said, on to the subject at hand. Here are some tips on how you can reduce the amount of SPAM you receive. No one has figured out a way to eliminate it, at least not yet, so, until then, read on…

1. Never, ever, ever click on a link in a SPAM message, especially one that says “click here to unsubscribe,” you’ll just be confirming your email address and opening the floodgates. Remember what I said above about what is SPAM!
2. Never, ever, ever reply to a SPAM message for the same reasons as above.
3. Try to avoid even opening a SPAM message because if it’s written in HTML and includes graphics, those graphics loading can confirm your email address just as if you’d clicked on a link yourself. If you must see what’s in that email, open it in a mail reader that can prevent or block the loading of external images or in SPAM stopping software that will only show you text.
4. Make an effort to avoid posting your email address on newsgroups, forums, chat rooms, guestbooks, blog comments, etc. SPAMmers use robots just like the search engines except these harvest email addresses.
5. Use two email addresses. One for posting on forums, etc. and one for your “real” correspondence.
6. Make your email address unique. Having an address like john@ is just going to make it easy for a SPAMmer. Once they find your domain name, which is so easy when it’s a service like hotmail or yahoo which SPAMmers already love, it’s simply a matter of sending SPAM to every name in the book. Of course, having an email address of j0hen233@ isn’t going to be easy for anyone to remember. This is where you need to find a happy medium, and one you can live with.
7. If you post your email address on your web site, encrypt it. This may only work for a while before the SPAMmers catch up to the encryption technology, but it’s something.
8. Use software to filter out SPAM. Mail reader software like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird have built in SPAM filters or add-ons that you can install to help manage your SPAM. Some flag the message with a [SPAM] tag to help you further filter them or just manually delete them. Some move suspicious emails to a bulk or SPAM folder where you have to go through them later and tell the software whether they are SPAM or not and/or delete them from there. There are also applications available that are not built into your email software but work with it just like your virus scan does. Personally, Marilyn and I use a piece of software called Spamihilator. We’ve used it for quite a number of years now and have found it to be quite helpful.
9. Use a service to filter out SPAM. There are services available that can filter your email before it reaches your mailbox. These services connect directly with your web site’s mail server. One such service is SpamStopsHere which has been used quite successfully by one of our clients for more than a year now.

And, finally, here’s something for you to keep in mind. Please be gentle with that “report as SPAM” or “report abuse” button or your instinctual desire to get back at the SPAMmer. Most SPAMmers forge the from email address, they also forge the headers of the message. This makes it difficult for anyone to tell where the message actually originated. Anyone with a web site can become the victim of a SPAMmer and have their email address “hijacked” and used to send out thousands or even millions of messages. Then, that poor web site owner is victimized yet again when his domain is reported as a SPAMmer and he finds himself on blacklists or blocked by ISPs.

High Aspirations received a letter in a semi official looking envelope from “New York Corporate Compliance.” Upon opening the letter, I see that it’s a form, again with that pretty official looking logo stating that it is a “Disclosure Statement” and that we need to fill it out and mail it back with a check of $125.00. What? That sounds kind of steep since the Annual Report to the New York Department of State is usually $9. Talk about a rate increase! There is a phone number on the form but since it was very late at night I figured I’d call to see what the recording would say, after all there is no government agency open that late. Well color me surprised when a live person answered on the first ring! At that point, I knew that this had nothing to do with any NY agency whatsoever. I actually started reading the fine print and realized that had I looked closer the first time around I would have seen that these people actually state right on the form that they are not affiliated with any government agency – so why make yourself look like you are? Because of the hundreds or thousands of people who would probably just pay it without question, slick, but not the way I’d want to do business!

HAI’s letter from the so-called New York Corporate Compliance.

The second scam we have recently received was an email from the IRS stating that we were due a refund. It actually made me look twice. It matched the look and feel of the true IRS web site and had no spelling errors – that I noticed at least, usually a very good indication of a fake. What proved to me that it was fake was two things:

1. The url in the email which sent me to a page that again looked like a page from the IRS site, went to some unknown domain.
2. The page it took me to asked for my credit card number. If you have ever checked your refund status at the IRS web site, you know that you do not need a credit card number, simply a social security number, and refund amount. If you’re not sure about the link you clicked on, go directly to the IRS web site by typing in http://www.irs.gov/ and you can take it from there.

As you can see, these guys are getting very good at their jobs which means you need to be even more careful than in the past. If you’re not sure about something you received, call your accountant or do a search online. More often than not, you’re not the first person to have received that letter, email, etc.

Well, before you hit send on your warning email to everyone on the planet, do yourself a favor and head on over to Google or better yet Snopes.com and do a search using the subject that you should be on the look out for. Or search for anything else that may be unique to that particular warning. More likely than not it’s a hoax, so save your friends and relatives some time and don’t bother passing on the warning. And, email your friend back and tell them that it’s all a lie and they have nothing to worry about.

Recently, there have been warning emails that actually mention the website snopes.com as the source of their information so be sure to check it out yourself.

It’s always better to be safe than sorry, but confirm the warning or debunk it, don’t just forward it on! If you do, you’ll save yourself the time and effort of sending an email to everyone you know as well as a ton of bandwidth which could be used for much more important things – like pictures of your new baby doing something adorably cute, or your cat, or your dog, or that naughty joke that made you laugh so hard you fell off your chair!

All of a sudden you’re faced with a slew of emails with subjects like “Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender” or “failure notice,” but the weird thing is that you haven’t sent any emails out or at least not enough emails to create this many bounced messages. If you take a closer look at the error messages, you’ll notice they are all being returned to a non existent email account on your domain – like xyz@yourdomain.com. Well, how can a non-existent email account send out emails? Easy, a SPAMmer decided they would use your domain to send out their garbage. This works great for them, they get to send out as much SPAM as they want and anyone who may want to report them for it would actually be reporting you. Now doesn’t that really make you want to flip the switch at their execution!

When you realize your domain has been hijacked, call your ISP immediately. They are usually able to help by putting certain security measures in place. That should work for a while, in the meantime, keep an eye on the amount of bounces you get, they should decrease dramatically.

Also, by notifying your ISP, you’ve proven to them that you aren’t the culprit so if someone does report you as a SPAMmer, they can immediately say, “nope, wasn’t them.”

Now, for our clients, there’s no need to call your ISP, just let us know and we’ll take care of all that for you.

1. Spelling & Grammar! Let’s not forget everything we learned in school just because email is so quick and easy! A “Dear” and a “Sincerely” won’t kill you and neither will enabling the spell check!
2. Real abbreviations only. While “texting” is the latest thing for teenagers, it’s not going to work for most people. I’m betting that most people could care less what your BFF (best friend forever) has to say when they don’t have a clue what language you are actually speaking! Don’t substitute U for you and 2 for two, if it’s not a real word, it’s not going to give your recipient a very good impression of you.
3. A subject? Don’t send email with a blank subject line. SPAMmers do that and if your recipient doesn’t recognize your name or email address, your message will most likely just get deleted.
4. Reply Vs. Reply-All. Do reply-all when you are in a business conversation or when all parties in the To and CC fields need to be kept informed of what is being discussed. Do not reply-all when you just have to tell your friend how funny that joke she cc’d to you and 100 of her closest friends is. Trust me, some of them don’t know you and most of them could care less if you are ROTFLOL.
5. Don’t yell! In a world where tone of voice doesn’t exist to convey how you are feeling, PLEASE DON’T YELL UNLESS YOU REALLY MEAN TO! Make sure that your caps lock is off before typing an email.
6. Your reply on top please. When someone opens your reply, you want them to see what you have to say, not what they wrote to you last. Don’t make them scroll and search to find your words of wisdom. Type your reply to them above the copies of the previous emails.
7. Keep those emails together. This is especially important in business conversations – don’t kill the copy! Keep all previous messages in the email. Who knows, the person you are replying to may need a reminder of what the conversation is all about! This is especially important if your reply is simply “thanks, I think we should do that” … “Do what?” your recipient wonders!
8. Think before you forward. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Scams abound on the web. This isn’t news. Before you forward that email to everyone in your address book, check a site like Snopes.com which tells fact from fiction for internet rumor, email scams, and urban legends.
9. Think before you send. Don’t email angry! Think twice before you tell someone where to go in writing. It’s in writing for goodness sake! Never a good thing to do! Give the circuit breaker in your head a chance to trip!
10. Huge attachments. These are still a no-no! Just because a lot more people have broadband doesn’t mean that it’s now okay to email that 10mb file. Ask first!

There’s more, trust me, and I could probably go on and on but let’s end it there. These are some of the more important ones anyway.

We hear this a lot, especially from new clients or contacts. The cause of a missed email is usually one of two reasons.

1) We made a typo in your email address. Hey, we’re only human! This can happen when we are given an email address over the phone. Let’s face it, even the clearest of phone connections can cause one letter to sound like another. If this is the reason why you haven’t gotten our email, we usually know right away because we’ll get a bounce back on the message and give you a call and get the correct email address. Problem solved!

2) You’ve got some SPAM sniffing software blocking our email. Almost everyone these days has to have something in place to block the tons of SPAM we all are forced to deal with. Most third-party services like Yahoo! have built-in SPAM prevention which dumps suspicious emails or email from unknown senders into a SPAM or bulk email folder. Before you call or email us to say you didn’t get the email, make sure you check those folders. Once you get that first email from us, make sure you let your SPAM prevention software or service know that you want to receive our messages. Usually there is a way to put an email address on a white or friends list. Hey, we’re friendly! And, there you go, problem solved!